Hypothetical on Just War

¶ … Roxane, Justin, and Patrick sounds like a sensible one, but the simple fact is that Roxane's position is insane, Justin's position is out-of-touch with the reality of twenty-first century warfare, and Patrick offers a traditional pacisism in the mold of Gandhi. I hope to demonstrate that Michael Walzer's conclusion on the justice of warfare -- that it is almost impossible to justify -- it is expensive -- runs double for the peacetime attack.

Roxane's kneejerk jingoism is entirely devoid of merit. The dictator of country Z. has a terrible reputation because he slaughters civilians and has threatened to invade neighboring states -- Roxanne's proposed solution is that the U.S. should actually invade the far-away state of Z, and slaughter their civilians. To pretend that there is any ethical consistency in Roxanne's suggestion here is nonsense. Her notion that Japan became a peaceful and stable ally of the U.S. because it had been attacked immediately with massive force is a travesty of the historical record. For a start, Japan attacked the U.S. directly, offering a casus belli; Z. did not. Second, the war against Japan actually threatened to drag on even longer than it did (since the Japanese hoped to conclude the conflict if not with victory than with negotiated terms short of unconditional surrender) and was only concluded by the use of newly-developed atomic weaponry which demonstrated that Japan could be rendered uninhabitable if it failed to surrender. Finally the notion that Japan became a friend and ally as a result of the forceful aggression of America's first attack against them is disingenuous as best: the development of the Axis powers in WW2 into American allies or client states was assisted more by a postwar economic policy (of which the Marshall Plan is perhaps the most famous example) than by the conduct of the war itself.

This last point reminds us of the merits of Patrick's pacifism. His emphasis on nonviolent alternatives will be derided by anyone who thinks that diplomacy is the only nonviolent alternative. But the simple fact is that bribery (so to speak) remains an even stronger technique than diplomacy. What if the vast expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan War had been spent instead on essentially buying the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people? For a start, if America had not begun with a "shock and awe" campaign killing countless civilians, those Iraqi hearts and minds would have been a lot more winnable; as Walzer correctly notes, "in a war for 'hearts and minds' rather than for land and resources, justice turns out to be a key to victory" (930). In other words, anybody who is daft enough to believe that America should be the world's policeman ought to recognize that a policeman without justice on his side is basically no better than a criminal. Moreover, the simple fact is that the phenomenal amount of money required to conduct a war in the twenty-first century would have been better spent just being placed in sacks and tossed at the Iraqi people in exchange for rejecting Hussein. The overall cost of the war was approximately 1.7 trillion dollars (vastly more if we include benefits owed to veterans, and interest) while the population of Iraq is only a little over 33 million -- at those prices we could have given every man, woman, and child in Iraq fifty thousand dollars in cash for the same price-tag, and experienced a far better result.